Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1951 and a New York resident since 1991, Ana Tiscornia is considered “a pivotal figure of the community of Latin American artists living in New York” who “has developed a very personal and consistent body of work blending artistic practice, criticism, curatorship and teaching.” (Gabriela Rangel, Visual Arts Director, Americas Society, NYC, in Arte Al Día Internacional, September 2012).
Ana Tiscornia´s work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Gurvich Museum in her native Montevideo, Nora Fisch Gallery in Buenos Aires, Josee Bienvenu Gallery in NYC, Solo Projects at ARCO, Madrid. She has participated in group exhibitions at Columbia University, Museum of Contemporary Art in Costa Rica, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, among others. She represented Uruguay in the II and the IX Bienal de La Habana, Cuba, and the III Bienal de Lima, Perú. Tiscornia is Emeritus Professor at State University of New York and the Art Editor of Point of Contact – The Journal of Verbal and Visual Arts, distributed by Syracuse University Press. Her work is in several public collections among them Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales and Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes, Montevideo, Uruguay; The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Chicago; North Dakota Museum of Art, North Dakota and it is represented in numerous private collections.

Tiscornia’s work emerges in the intersection of a deep sensibility towards social issues, ideas about globalization and displacement which arise from her own personal experiences, years of past training and practice in the field of architecture and an optimistic and kind outlook.

The notion of habitable spaces —inasmuch as they are containers of memories and experiences— is central to her production. Her cardboard constructions, paintings and collages often depart from architectural plans for domestic spaces, either the homes she inhabited as a young person in Uruguay or ones designed by classic modernist architects. She is equally interested in the idea of interstitial spaces, those where the experiences of immigrants, refugees and homeless take place, as well as in the metaphorical fractures of space that are the sign of contemporary times, out of which new manners of living and interacting with one another arise.

With these issues in mind, Tiscornia subjects the original floor plans and architectural references to a series of implosions, distortions, and superimpositions. These “collapses” of space are the initial step in the construction of each piece. Tiscornia then lovingly reconstructs those fragments into new realities, working in layers as if sedimenting one on top of other. This process gives rise to a poetics of vulnerability of great formal beauty, in which the legacy of constructive and concrete art of the Río de la Plata region reverberates as it is translated into strips of cardboard, fragments of mesh, layers of printed paper embedded with contemporary concerns.